A TechCrunch post today announced the launch of a new org chart site that aims to document the management structure of the world’s 20,000 largest corporations.

Normally I don’t read TechCrunch, but the use of Wiki in the title brought it up in my Google News fetchermajiggy. The title of the post is “TheOfficialBoard Launches With Wiki Org Charts For 20,000 Companies“.

Is TheOfficialBoard really a wiki? I checked the site, and they don’t use the word anywhere I could find. Perhaps this is nitpicking semantics, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about. What really makes something a wiki?

One argument (and apparently the one taken by the TechCrunch author) is that the term wiki indicates a destination for user generated content - a work created by its consumers. Perhaps I’m too focused on the technology, having worked on wiki software for the past several years, but I find this way too general.

Under this definition, Digg.com could be called a wiki. So could Yahoo! Answers, Flickr and YouTube. These sites were all established before anything user generated was called a wiki, and so have avoided that label. If nobody had ever thought of social video (just suspend disbelief) it’s very likely somebody in the tech press today would call the brand new YouTube site a wiki.

Nothing against any of these services, but I believe this overly broad use cheapens the term.

So then, what is a wiki? Here are some definitions off the web. It’s interesting to note the subtle differences between them.

A wiki is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. - Wikipedia.org

A collaborative website which can be directly edited by anyone with access to it. - Wiktionary

A Web site that allows visitors to make changes, contributions, or corrections. - Merriam-Webster

World Wide Web site that can be modified or contributed to by users. - Britannica

So, does TheOfficialBoard.com fit these definitions? Sort of. What is it about the site that makes it more of a social web application and less of a wiki? For me, it’s that the data the site manages isn’t web page content. It’s highly structured data, as you can see from the screenshot at the top of this post.

User generated data that isn’t web page content isn’t really a wiki, it’s a social web application. Yes, this is kind of nitpicky, but hey, I was an English major in college and I believe that words must be used carefully. There are already lots of terms for non-web page user generated content, so let’s use those.

In the category of using a wiki for a general web CMS, you can drop the user generated part. When you do that (only you as the administrator have edit access to the wiki) is it still a wiki? For another post. What do you think makes something a wiki?